Samuel Butler Quotes

Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.

Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

Logic is like the sword — those who appeal to it shall perish by it.

Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.

We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to them.

To live is like to love — all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.

I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.

A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.

[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.

They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Having, then, once introduced an element of inconsistency into his system, he was far too consistent not to be inconsistent consistently, and he lapsed ere long into an amiable indifferentism which to outward appearance differed but little from the indifferentism …

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.